On Memorial Day, we often think of black and white pictures of faces from times we’ve only read about. We might consider a newspaper article or item on the nightly news about a soldier who died, though we can’t recall where or when in the next minute. Some citizens have a personal connection to a father or mother, grandfather, uncle or great someone or other whose medal is in someone’s attic.

If we’re conscious enough of the day and our city is, too, we might go to a parade. If we try even harder, we go to a cemetery and listen to a speech, prayer, and song.

The United States Military of today is second to none. They are highly trained professionals. It is more stringent now than in years past. They are the one percent: citizens who choose to defend the country they love, pass the required tests to get in, and demonstrate the resolve, determination, strength, and grit to complete and pass a brutal training process. A surprising number do not make it. Yes, they are the one percent, but their families are ordinary people with an added layer to the usual worries of life.

If you have someone near and dear in the military, Memorial Day goes a little deeper. It is personal. It is close.

At the beginning of your soldier’s training, you belong to groups who help each other through. You learn of plans accomplished or delayed. Someone got their college degree and decided to enlist. Someone has dreamed of this since he was 5. Someone enlisted and told her family afterward, leaving them to adjust quickly and ignore the gut punch. You see question after question about this new life. What does this phrase mean? When does this phase happen? Eyes glaze over from the number of acronyms until you start using them, yourself, as a convenient sort of shorthand. You read many requests asking for prayer for their trainee to pass yet another test. To recover from an injury or sickness. To survive heartbreak. To endure missing important family events: funerals, weddings, graduations, births. To keep going when they’d rather quit. You see many photos of handsome and pretty soldiers and compliment the ones who posted them. You smile at family pictures and can almost hear the exclamations of greeting and laughter and catching up. You cheer every success and graduation.

As time passes,you admire crafts made by hands of someone who is urging their soldier home stitch by stitch, project by project. Maybe you let someone know love is sent their way when they are lonely or worried. You commend every promotion. You read questions about locations of military bases. What are they like? How dangerous is it? You are privy to close calls and near misses. You hear about news of deployment and visceral sickness and worry so heavy it makes it hard to do ordinary things that need doing. Pride and fear become inextricably linked, and heaven is inundated with desperate prayers from all corners of the country at all hours.

And often on those support pages you see the picture of someone’s son or daughter or husband or wife and read that they were killed yesterday. They were killed in a live fire training exercise. They were killed in a roll-over tactical vehicle accident. They were killed in Afghanistan or Iraq or someplace whose name we know, with a few facts we can repeat, but not much else. You recognize a name. A face. And there it is.

Because Memorial Day is so much more than a parade or speech or photo. It is a person you knew. A person whose mother you talked with and whose visits home you celebrated. This soldier is a member of those admired by good people, but personally known by few. And this soldier deserves not just a minute on a day of remembering. He or she merits some time of reflection on his life and dreams, quirky sense of humor, tender letters home, anxious waiting, and desire to do a good thing. This soldier deserves a country’s honor.

Images: Unsplash; National Infantry Museum

When you look at your newborn, tiny and soft, with eyes that hold the trust of the ages and hair as soft as down, you wonder how, in an instant, you can protect this little one. You are a mother. Somewhere your subconscious tells you that new title is yours for life. You cannot get enough of soaking in the sight of the little one in your arms.

And through those first weeks at the smallest sound you go over to where your baby is sleeping to check and make sure all is well. And all the years afterward you continue to “just check” and watch that little one grow and become a mixture of what you hope and what you don’t understand. Your child asks you to look. “Look and see what I can do!” Other times they hope you won’t see what they’ve done. And on through the years, the invisible, inescapable pull set in mothers everywhere by the Creator, Himself, is a contrast of welcome and unwelcome.

This Mother’s Day I think of my own mom and I remember . . .

Our dog was giving birth to a litter of puppies in the corner of our dirt floor garage. I was elementary school-aged. My mom had called a friend so she could bring her kids over and we could all watch the miracle of birth together. We huddled together by the garage door and watched Specky during her most personal moments as she ate the membrane and licked each newborn. I was embarrassed while Mom was enthralled, but we watched because she wanted me to learn.

As I drove home through the dark streets, I could see my house lit up and a shadow in the window watching for me. I’d been out with some high school friends drinking pop and talking and laughing. It was nearly midnight. In her mind I’d been kidnapped and was struggling to escape. In my mind whatever it was I faced from imagined kidnappers held nothing to what I faced from my mother.

I carried out a few suitcases and whatever other few things I had to bring, and stashed them all in a friend’s car. I was leaving for college during a time when my residence had one phone that hung on a hallway wall. There were no emails nor texts, and long distance costs were by the call and by the minute. Kids who went to college didn’t have much contact with their parents other than letters and holidays. As we pulled away, I could see my mom in the rearview mirror. She stood in the driveway and watched us until we were out of sight.

I was in my 30’s fulfilling some duty at the front of the church, probably leading worship or some other such role. My mom had, herself, spent her life doing the same thing, though her fingers always made the piano keys sing more sweetly than mine ever did. What can I say? She had a great touch. There was mom sitting in the pew listening and watching with a slight smile. It’s possible she was thinking what could have been done to make the song sound better. It’s probable she would have been right.

When I was in my 40’s, I look up as I inserted the key into the car, and there she was at the window watching to make sure I’d made it safely from her house to my car. Granted, by now her house was in a part of town that, while not riddled with crime, held the potential for occasional trouble. I don’t know how she planned to fight off my attackers.

We’d gotten a pretty good wallop of snow, wet and heavy and high; the kind that lands folks in the hospital with a heart attack. I was feeling my 50 some years as I shoveled the layers to get to the pavement, and as I trudged, out of breath, back to the house to return the shovel to its usual place, I caught a glimpse of my mom. She’d been standing at the window watching me. Still.